Words Unlimited

Poetry London - Frances Leviston & Michael Symmons Roberts

It’s always worth turning up for a Poetry London launch. They offer readings by some of the best contemporary poets as well as a glass of wine. All for free. I’m more than happy to buy the magazine! I was glad I made the effort a couple of Fridays ago, despite a wet and windy evening. The readers who stood out for me at this launch of the autumn issue, No 73, were Frances Leviston and Michael Symmons Roberts.

Leviston spoke of her work-in-progress, her second collection that explores ideas of disinformation. She read the title piece, ‘Disinformation.’ An unsettling poem, it interweaves sharply-observed details of the preparations for a children’s party with more disquieting images that emerge from the voice of radio news. Leviston is a cool, assured reader of her work. I’m looking forward to the new book for which, as yet, no publication date, but, I gather, ‘Disinformation’ will appear in the TLS sometime soon. Do look out for it.

Compelling in a different way was Michael Symmons Roberts. A former Head of Development for BBC Religion & Ethics, not surprisingly, many of his poems seem to be asking – what might be an ethical way to live? Novelist Jeanette Winterson has said of Symmons Roberts: 'He is a religious poet in a secular age. His work is about the connection between the things of the spirit and the things of the world… his work is about transcendence.'

Ideas around ethics and transcendence certainly lie in the larger resonances of the work but, initially, Symmons Roberts draws the listener in with his warm, almost matter-of-fact reading style and the startling, exact details of the ‘things of the world’ in the here-and-now; the world we’re all trying to comprehend, as with these lines from ‘Offset’: "Bad guards play poker in the vaults/where my subprime lies in a velvet bag/and nonperforming assests float in jars."

Symmons Roberts explained that ‘Offset’ - along with the other poems he read - is from his next book-length project: 150 poems each of 15 lines. Why? These are loosely based on the Psalms, of which there are 150. The Psalms reflect upon man’s relationship to God and cover the full range of human emotions. Symmons Roberts’s project seems to be to reflect on man’s relationship to the world – to his fellow man and to the natural world. His gaze is wide; although he looks the current financial crisis squarely in the eye, in ‘On Grace,’ he seems to suggest reasons for optimism:

October ripens under leaf-mould,

ancient limewashed walls grow warm

in late, slant sun. A deer halts in a field alone.

And we are not lost yet.

 

To write 150 poems of 15 lines each is a tight constraint for a writer to impose on himself but, on the evidence of the five he read, it becomes clear that the restriction allows him both to range wide but also to focus on the precise moment/insight. On the page the five poems each look quite different – interesting how many different forms 15 lines might take. Though reading at this autumn launch, these psalm-based poems appeared in the spring issue of Poetry London – worth getting the back issue. I’m looking forward to the full collection in spring 2013.

Other poets featured in the autumn issue include Canadian Karen Solie, pictured on the cover [above], Michael Longley, Gillian Allnutt, Daljit Nagra, Rosie Shepperd and the prize winners of the 2012 Poetry London competition. First prize went to Liz Berry. If you want to know what makes a winning poem, read judge Neil Astley's [Mr Bloodaxe] report which features along with an interview with Annie Freud and much more.

National Poetry Day Live

Thoroughly enjoyed myself down at the South Bank yesterday for National Poetry Day Live. Five hours of live readings and all for free from a wide range of poets. Among those I saw: Christopher Reid, Roger McGough, Mario Petruccio, Liane Strauss, Simon Barraclough, Danny Abse, Karen McCarthy Woolf, and the legendary John Cooper Clarke who rounded off the day with his crazy 'Beazley Street' and its refurbished sequal 'Beazley Boulevard'.

 

 

All Change For Aldeburgh Poetry Festival

Big changes this year for the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival - it's going to be bigger and will be largely based inland at Snape.

I wonder what will be lost and what will be gained? I've booked my tickets and I'm looking forward to finding out.

This film explains the changes and also why it's time to book tickets if you haven't already done so! More on the programme and booking, here.

 

HappenStance

Talking, as I was last week, of enthusiasm - those individuals who set up and run small poetry presses must have the enthusiasm and stamina of an Olympic marathon runner.

Ten days ago I attended Free Verse, the poetry book fair in London; an event which brought together over fifty small presses and publishers. After a happy day of browsing, I came away with a bag full of books, pamphlets and flyers. For the last ten days I’ve been sifting through the haul. 

Among the smaller imprints that stand out is HappenStance. Founded by poet Helena Nelson seven years ago and based in Scotland, the venture is dedicated to the publication of pamphlets.

HappenStance publications have a satisfying minimalism: creamy paper, with thoughtful and often a witty graphics on the cover. They are a wonderfully uncluttered way to sample 20 + poems by an individual whose work you might not have come across.

 

It’s not surprising that in 2010 HappenStance won the Michael Marks Publishers' Award. As well as the quality of the poetry, and the production, another thing that makes this enterprise stand out is it that, uniquely, it offers a subscription.

For £7.50 a year you get, among other things, a free pamphlet of your choice plus a chapter of the HappenStance story – invaluable insight into this kind of publishing. It seems that Helena Nelson, though she doesn't run a competition as other pamphlet publshers do, is a careful reader of submissions. For more on subscriptions and submissions visit the HappenStance website. 

Other presses that caught my eye include: Templar, Cinnamon, Like This Press, Stairwell Books, Valley Press and Pighog Press. Pighog has just launched, in conjunction with The Poetry School, a new pamphlet competition. Details here.

It was happenstance that I was able to make it to the book fair - I was to have been out of London that Saturday but things changed. If you weren’t able to attend Free Verse, the website is still live with a useful list of all the presses who had stalls that day with links to their websites. With just a click or two you’ll find access to some of the best poetry publishing enthusiasts.

Winning Words

Good see poets have been part of the whole Olympics Festival. There was Poetry Parnassus, the Rain of Poems and, off to see athletics tomorrow, I'm looking forward to finding all the poetry installations around the Olympic park.

These Winning Words installations include work by some of our leading poets: Carol Ann Duffy, John Burnside, Jo Shapcott, Caroline Bird and Lemn Sissay.  Find out more, here.

And The Winner Is ...

Picked at random, Caroline Hadley from Hampshire is the winner of the prize draw. A copy of Suzanne Joinson's novel, A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar, is on its way to her. Congratulations, Caroline.

Thanks to all who left comments and named objects to trigger a story.

Just a thought: why not collect up all the objects listed in the comments section after the interview with Suzanne and see if you can get them all into one story? It's the sort of writing exercise that let's you break free ... Who knows where it might lead

Muldoon on Song v Poem

To the South Bank last Saturday afternoon for the Poetry Society Annual Lecture, The Word On The Street: Parnassus and Tin Pan Alley, given by Paul Muldoon. On the subject of the relationship between poetry and song Muldoon is well placed to speak, being prolific in both.

He had no firm conclusions but offered observations, lines of inquiry. He suggested that a song needs to be understood on first hearing, whereas a poem can bear several readings in order to yield its full effects. “There’s more pressure per square inch in a poem.” 

Of course I immediately thought of the exceptions. Dylan’s 'Desolation Row' is a song that doesn't spell it out, and has a deal of pressure per square inch. But then Dylan is an exception in so many ways. 

Muldoon wondered if there was a correspondence between the ‘bridge’ of the song form and the sestet in a sonnet. Both seem to serve a similar purpose - to disrupt a rhyme scheme that’s becoming too predictable.

He thought that the pattern of a song, once set, bound you to it. Whereas, "in our current era of poetry" this is not the case with a poem. 

He was curious to know if, with a song, the lyric or the music must come first? No clear cut rule here. His investigations reveal that P J Harvey increasingly spends more time on the words before writing the music whereas, for Paul Simon, the music must come first. Simon believes that if the tune doesn’t catch on it doesn’t matter how good the lyrics are.

He talked about how, for him, writing poems began with "collecting components" – found phrases or an image or a fact that he "lets resonate."  His poem 'A Giraffe' began with the image of cracked mud around a sun-baked watering hole. He saw the correspondence between the cracked earth and the patterning on a giraffe.  The resulting  poem has been published as this limited edition print. It will also appear in a new collection coming later this year.

Song, that is Words + Music, Muldoon reckoned, allowed for more “emotional ramping up” and more narrative than might be tolerated in a poem.

With all this thought of song on my mind, I took the bus home, and overheard this conversation:

    "Adele's going to sing National Anthem at Olympics."

    "What's National Anthem? I don't know that one."

    "Dunno"

    "I'll Google it."

More on how to get a copy of the Giraffe print, here.

Muldoon’s lecture will be published in Poetry Review, later this year.    

More on Muldoon's song writing, here.   

Poems From The Sky

The Rain of Poems was a wonderful event at the start of Poetry Parnassus. Just after 9.15 last night a helicopter began circling the Jubilee Gardens on London's South Bank. The wind took some of the tumbling verses onto roof tops but soon the thousands of bookmarks, printed with poems from around the world, begin to flutter down. At first they looked like a flock of birds, then, as the flock broke up and each got closer,they seemed more like those 'helicopter' sycamore seeds twirling and often defying an outstretched hand. You couldn't quite work out where they would land. I've never seen so many people running to grab a poem! Great stuff! A few grainy shots from my phone:

The first few coming into land

Hundreds fell on rooftops

 ... and on the 'Udderbelly', that the upturned purple cow

Raining Poems

Rain is forecast on London's South Bank tomorrow evening. Not the wet stuff we've had for the last couple of months but a shower of 100,000 poems. This will be the sixth city on which Chilean arts collective, Casagrande, have sprinkled fine words in many languages.

This film shows their performance in Warsaw - bombing or raining?

 

More on the South Bank event, here.

It's part of Poetry Parnassus, the literary Olympics

Poets on Childhood

To the Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury last Saturday afternoon for the launch of the new anthology, Tokens For The Foundlings.

Edited by poet Tony Curtis, the book brings together over 80 poems by over 70 poets, including leading names from either side of the Atlantic: Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke, Seamus Heaney, Sean O'Brien, Don Paterson, Thomas Lux, August Kleinzahler.

In the museum's upper gallery we were treated to an hour of readings, by a host of poets including Helen Dunmore, George Szirtes, Mimi Khalvati, Dannie Abse, Rosie Shepperd, Jane Clarke and Curtis himself - all of whom have work in the book.

Published by Seren, it's a handsome volume, a wonderful collection of contemporary work. And given its themes - childhood, orphans, families - it's a book that will appeal to the general reader, too.

As the poets have donated their work, all proceeds from the book go to support the work of the Foundling Museum. What's not to like?

You can get a copy, here.